The battle is fought, but not yet won.

I apologise for the messiness of the above table – I’ll fix it at a later date! Suffice to say, Lee and I are lucky to be in a good position for the final four rounds tomorrow (the break is likely to be 17 teams points). Duncan and Ed have put up a stella performance, their forth was in a top room and they took a close second to Oxford A. Somehow I think we’ll see them easily hitting above straights. Maddy and Miles are also in a strong position, again doing very well. Certainly this is one of the best performances St Andrews has had at Euros for a while – lets hope we keep it up tomorrow!

Our judges seem to be having fun, with Michael seeing one of the best debates of his life in the top room of the competition. Sad man that I am, this has made me really jealous…

Also, as a quick note, our friends from Edinburgh A and Glasgow A are both on 9 teams points! Scottish success for the win!

((With standard apologies to any who might take offense at the below; the following is my opinion and should not be assumed to in any way represent reality. Written last night when exhausted with no proof reading)).

A brief(ly thorough) postmortem for those interested. Motions are ‘shorthand’ because I’m too lazy to look up the exact wording.

Round 1: THW remove all political and geographical considerations from EU accession. We were first opp in this gift of a motion – it’s not obvious to me that it would be opp-heavy in all rooms but it does seem as though one would anticipate a pre-ponderance of opp teams winning given this was R1. We got to talk about Turkey, at quite some length, and the attitude of Russia to NATO expansion as an example of non-contiguous geographical expansion having dodgy foreign policy consequences. Some quite neat stuff about creating an incentive to be more retrogressive (as well as the obvious; removal of incentive for progress) (China is authoritarian and that authoritarianism allows them to pursue econ. growth more aggressively than a liberal democracy). Prop having set the burden (a) in a rather diffuse way and (b) to include human rights progress as a desired outcome made this fairly straightforward. Some structural issues meant this wasn’t as clear a win as it should have been.

Round 2: THB teacher’s authority is more important than children’s enjoyment. We west first prop here so rather than do spanking or something equally dull we decided to run it as whether the government should adopt pupil-directed learning. We said this radically undermined the ability to pursue policy agendas and students would choose activities which were enjoyable but not for their longterm wellbeing. Oxford A in first prop put up some heavy resistance and leaned heavily on the importance of developing self-reliance for later life. It was fairly close (I would like to think it could have gone the other way) but they took the win and we agree that’s the right call.

Round 3: THW use development aid to incentivise developing nations to take in large numbers of immigrants. It was a hard motion to figure out a sensible prop for, but thankfully we were second opp. We were lucky in that the top half of the table got themselves tied up in knots over immigration from the /developed/ world which we just dismissed as a non-issue and apparently the judges bought out dismissal. So it because a bottom-half debate between ourselves and Warwick who did a good job but ignored a lot of our material about the incentive effects on development (kinda important?). Warwick and I were criticised for going off the deep end in terms of speed whereas Ed really pulled this one through in the summation with his ‘calm, slow, clear’ shtick.

Round 4: THW censor art which provokes social disgust. I’m still not sure what ‘social disgust’ is as opposed to normal disgust; one assumes it has to do with disgust linked to social harms such as disgust as a result of cultural denigration but no one ever made it explicit. Oxford B did a decent 1st prop but I felt there were gaps enough that wanted reanalysis to bring home why there was an analogue to be had between physical and emotional harms and how this linked to the stuff about ‘art as discourse’, to whit: the emotional and the rational are both aspects of one’s identity, people have strong emotional ties to certain aspects of their cultural identity which they might rate as more important than avoiding physical harm (e.g. rather be harmed than have the prophet denigrated), controversial art exploits this emotional bond and in so doing in the name of ‘discourse’ uses my emotions against my reason ((there’s a rape analogy which wants having here)). But I spent too much time on rebuttal and seemingly didn’t link the material together sufficiently so when Cambridge hit us with (well developed; they clearly won the round) spurious rubbish about the effects on minority groups the absence of what would apparently have been the conventional extension about practical consequences was more palpable. We thought we had the third (ahem) nailed down, but /given/ the extension didn’t come across (a) as being sufficiently distinct from 1st prop and (b) as having had the various strands drawn together ((c) there was some question of there being a contradiction between the rational/emotional duality of the self and the appeal of art to the emotional. It isn’t there but it wasn’t made sufficiently clear that it wasn’t in the way I ran it, seemingly) it didn’t really count, so even though it was accepted that 1st prop, especially us and even to some extent 2nd opp had more or less obliterated 1st opp role fulfillment came into play and as they’d done their job and we’d only done half of ours (in the context of the judgement) we took the 4th. Had we had a judge with less interest in things like role fulfillment, or who paid less attention to the coherence of the overall adjudication narrative (read; a weaker judge) we’d have taken the 3rd.